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12
Aug
2022
Sunday August 7, 2022
Is it just my imagination, or is there a predictable pattern to news coverage these days?
The pattern starts with someone accusing, say, Hockey Canada for covering up charges of rape. Or attacking the Canadian Armed Forces for sex discrimination. Or a charity comes under fire for misusing donated dollars. Or a TV program unearths evidence that a renovation firm’s labyrinth of corporate connections defrauds both its customers and Canada Revenue.
The accusers are willing to go public with their names and faces.
The accused are not. They decline personal interviews. Instead, they issue carefully-worded statements which assert, essentially, that the conduct in question contravenes their code of ethics, didn’t happen, and if it did, won’t happen again.
The language used is numbingly bureaucratic.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Jan White, hierarchy, human interest
August 4, 2022
Zoology 101 was a favourite first-year course at the University of British Columbia. My class probably had 250 in it, enthralled by from Dr. Ian McTaggart-Cowan’s witty and profound explanations of what animals were, and how they related to each other.
As I recall those classes, McTaggart-Cowan talked more about animals than plants. Certainly it’s the animals I remember. Everything from single-celled amoebas to humans.
A lot of it dealt with taxonomy – the formal classifications of animals. That we humans, for example, are a species, Homo Sapiens. Of the genus Homo. Of the family Hominidae. Of the order Primates. Of the class Mammalia. Of the phylum Chordata. Of the kingdom Animalia. Of the domain Eukarya.
Taxonomy, however, doesn’t answer the question, “Why?”
Tags: Zoology, taxonomy, fours
Sunday July 24, 2022
There is only one event worth writing about this week -- Pope Francis’s “penitential pilgrimage.”
“Penitential” means doing penance -- making amends for having done something wrong.
The name alone acknowledges that the Roman Catholic church failed its indigenous members.
Church doctrines have long taught that Jesus took upon himself the sins of the world. Figuratively, Pope Francis chose to do the same with his church’s involvement in residential schools.
People have mixed feelings about his trip and his apologies.
Tags: Pope, Indigenous, Francis, pilgrimage
29
Jul
Thursday July 28, 2022
Last weekend marked a significant anniversary. Twenty-nine years ago, on July 23, 1993, Joan and I moved into our new home here in the Okanagan Valley.
It’s the longest I have ever lived in one place.
The previous longest was 25 years in Toronto – equivalent, I sometimes joke, to a life sentence without parole. Then we moved west. Back west, actually, since I had grown up in Vancouver, and Joan in the Kootenays.
So we watched our worldly possessions disappear into a moving company’s container, locked up our now-empty home, and set out across the country in a Honda Accord packed full of suitcases, house plants, and two panicky cats.
The cats yowled for 100 miles, and then became – dare I put it this way? – catatonic. They shut down. They didn’t eat, drink, pee or poo for five days.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: alone, Anniversary, moving, retreats
Earlier this week, the B.C. Wildlife Society released a disturbing report. Steelhead are headed for extinction.
If you’re addicted to fishing, you’ll know what a steelhead is. It is considered a world-class sport fish for its spectacular size and fighting capabilities,
Steelhead fall into the crack between migratory fish and resident fish. Indeed, the federal Department of Fisheries (DFO) oscillates between defining them as salmon and as trout.
DFO has historically based its classification on the “looks like a duck” principle -- if it looks like a salmon, and acts like a salmon, it must be a salmon.
Except that it’s not.
Tags: steelhead, trout, fisheries